12 Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England

Leeds University Business School (LUBS) is a full service business school built on the rigour of disciplinary strength while working in a pluralistic way to deliver impactful research and education. With a research environment judged to be conducive to producing world leading and internationally excellent research by the REF 2021 panel, the Faculty is investing substantially in the further development of this environment through the Faculty’s two year Post Doctoral Fellowship Scheme We are looking for enthusiastic and highly motivated individuals who can make a significant contribution to our research activities. You will receive a structured programme of support.  Dedicated mentors will work with you and advise you on journal article preparation and submission, grant application, and new research and career trajectories. You will also have opportunities to develop teaching skills by undertaking teaching duties at definite, identifiable points in the year.

We are looking for an Innovate UK-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join a highly dynamic, interdisciplinary team; focusing on surface science techniques and friction force measurements to investigate lubrication of plant protein-based fibre-rich formulations. You will actively collaborate with experts in the School of Food Science and Nutrition from colloid science and microbiology and with commercial food industrial stakeholders (large as well as small-scale industries).  You will work on designing new plant protein-based lubricant formulations and test their technical feasibility in commercial fibre-rich food formulations. This will involve integrating macroscale friction force measurements, surface science knowledge, advanced imaging and other colloid science techniques to gain mechanistic information on the nature of the processes occurring in complex human oral mucosa. In particular, you will conduct research on biological tissues, such as mucins from animal origin as well as plant proteins and fibres that are widely used in sustainable food formulations.

We are seeking a highly motivated and talented individual interested in undertaking an exciting 2-year postdoctoral project in the laboratory of Professor Frank Sobott (Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry). You will make leading contributions to an EU Horizon-funded project (with Innovate UK guarantee funding), as well as having the opportunity to develop an own research profile by pioneering structural mass spectrometry approaches for fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD).  The project is part of a prestigious, 9.7 MЄ European collaboration on establishing innovative and efficient methods for FBDD, which is a widely used approach in the biopharma industry for developing small molecule lead structures into effective protein and oligonucleotide ligands (drugs). The project includes leading groups representing key structural techniques such as x-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryo-EM as well as machine learning (AI). Structural mass spectrometry efforts are led by Leeds in close collaboration with a partner in Lisbon (Portugal). Academic and industrial partners include Instruct-ERIC, EMBL, Diamond Light Source, ESRF Grenoble, EU-OPENSCREEN and others in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Latvia and Switzerland.

Understanding the mechanisms and the drivers behind people’s choices has been the focal point of a range of academic disciplines and a key component in policy making, for example aiming to shift behaviours for a more sustainable future. Mathematical process models from psychology, behavioural econometric models and data-driven machine learning algorithms have been developed in parallel with only limited knowledge spillovers among them, but with the same core goal of understanding individual decision making. Models from Mathematical Psychology focus on understanding the processes leading to decisions. These are often described as causal models aiming to answer how an individual reached a certain choice and understand the interrelated processes behind that. Those models, however, are rarely applied outside a controlled lab setting, with only a handful of real-world applications.

This is a unique opportunity to join the exciting European Horizon 2020 project UPSURGE which will provide a new development model for cities based on nature based solutions for renaturing urban space and addressing the challenges of cities’ carbon footprint and air pollution. This interdisciplinary role will be directly guided by Dr Jim McQuaid (providing expertise in atmospheric monitoring), Professor Alison Tomlin (urban dispersion) and Dr Cat Scott (nature based solutions), but will also benefit from wide ranging interactions with the UPSURGE project team. Holding a PhD (or close to completion) in the Physical Sciences, Environmental Science, Engineering, Environmental Statistics or related topics, you will have an excellent working knowledge of air pollution science including monitoring techniques, emissions and dispersion mechanisms. Experience in processing of large and complex data sets, statistics and chemical or dispersion simulation is also desirable.

We seeking to appoint a new Research Fellow to join the research team of Professor Russell Harris in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Leeds. This team explores and investigates how novel methods of fabrication and manufacture can enable new capabilities and functionality in healthcare and medical devices. Our group have a large portfolio of externally funded research projects and have been recognised to be World Leading. We have extensive cross-disciplinary partnerships internally, nationally, and globally. Themes of technical research within this include: digital manufacturing methods, automation, high-resolution and micro fabrication, functional materials, and soft materials. Current healthcare application studies for this research include devices for; soft robotics, robotic surgery, health monitoring devices, and soft tissue prosthetics. You will work on conceptualising, designing and engineering transformative healthcare devices. The creation of these will be investigated by experimentation with a range manufacturing processes to realise the required material compatibility, compositional variation, and scales and accuracy of fabrication. This will include the design and engineering of new or adapted components, systems and hardware to enable effective operation. It will then involve conducting analysis of device capabilities and performance. Your predominant application focus will be in soft material devices.

You will join a collaborative programme with Merck Performance Materials Limited, the world’s leading company working in liquid crystals. You will work with a team of scientists from the company along with Dr Mamatha Nagaraj, Dr Richard Mandle, Prof Helen Gleeson and Prof Gordon Love at the University of Leeds. You will have an experimental PhD degree (or have submitted your thesis before taking up the role) in Chemistry or a closely related discipline with a strong background in organic synthesis of small molecules. You will also have direct experience of experimental techniques relevant to the study of liquid crystals or other soft matter systems. You will focus on a range of liquid crystal-based technologies and work on the design, synthesis, optimisation and characterisation of liquid crystals for optical devices. In addition to carrying out a series of research projects, you will be an excellent communicator, responsible for day-to-day interactions with the company, writing papers, contributing to patent applications and making presentations. You will travel regularly to the company’s premises in the UK and occasionally Germany.

You will join a collaborative programme with Merck Perfromance Materials Limited, the world’s leading company working in liquid crystals. You will work with a team of scientists from the company along with Prof Helen Gleeson, Prof Gordon Love, Dr Richard Mandle and Dr Mamatha Nagaraj at the University of Leeds. You will have an experimental PhD degree (or have submitted your thesis before taking up the role) and research experience in Physics and/or Engineering along with significant experience in liquid crystal physics, optics, electro-optics, active and passive device fabrication or related areas. You will focus on a range of liquid crystal-based technologies and work on the design, fabrication, optimisation and characterisation of liquid crystal devices. In addition to carrying out a series of research projects, you will be an excellent communicator, responsible for day-to-day interactions with the company, writing papers, contributing to patent applications and making presentations. You will travel regularly to the company’s premises in the UK and occasionally to Germany.

This project will take inspiration from biomineralization to achieve unprecedented – dynamic – control over crystallization processes.  To achieve this ambitious goal, it is necessary to create well-defined reaction environments, to rigorously characterise nucleation and growth with excellent time resolution and to be able to interact with a forming crystal. Thanks to advances in microfabrication techniques and analytical methods we finally have the tools required to meet these demands.  You will use microfluidic devices to create environments ranging from flowing droplets to defined, static chambers.  Solutions, particles and organic additives will be added at specific time points – even to flowing droplets – changing their compositions, and advanced analytical techniques – including synchrotron-based methods – will be used to study crystallization processes over multiple length scales with exceptional time-resolution.  

Transforming the heat system is an urgent priority for the UK. The Climate Change Committee, an independent advisor to the UK Government, has stated that immediate action is required if we are to radically reduce carbon emissions produced by the provision of heat and meet our national and international climate-change targets. In addition to the urgent need to mitigate climate change, fuel poverty affects 11% of households in England; we need to find ways to provide affordable heating in the face of rising energy prices. The demand for cooling is also likely to rise substantially in coming years, in response to a warmer climate and growing thermal comfort requirements, which will increase energy use and add to carbon emissions. Such radical transformation presents a substantial challenge: affordable provision of heating and cooling requires multiple decision-makers within this complex system to consider energy vectors, technologies, users, institutions and networks. You will contribute to cutting-edge research that will drive the transformation of city-level heat systems by explicitly recognising and embracing their complexity. New analysis frameworks and decision-support tools, grounded in complexity theory and developed and applied through participatory processes, will empower the delivery of both significant decarbonisation and profound health and wellbeing benefits.